Praxis Data Server (https://spineimage.ca) #77
Description
https://praxisinstitute.org wants to fund a Canada-wide spine scan sharing platform.
They were considering paying OBI as a vendor, and having them set up a neuroimaging repository. But had doubts about the quality of that solution and have looked around for others, and have landed on asking us for help.
We've proposed a federated data sharing plan and they are interested in pursuing this line.
Needs
- publication (marketting, accessibility): datasets need to be obvious enough and easy enough to get at that they get used
- we're thinking this looks like a portal or meta-index site; something, like https://portal.conp.ca/
- curation: datasets need to be kept in a high quality state, with good metadata and artifacts corrected
- this means specifying formats (like BIDS, nifti, etc)
- having scripts to automatically check these formats like we do in spine-generic
- specifying a checklist of manual curation steps
- training a curator at each participating hospital/site
- data protection: datasets must have effective ACLs attached; the ACLs should implement the data sharing and consent agreements that each source study gets
- this is one of the motivations for making a federated system: each jurisdiction operates under slightly different data protection laws and making a single site for everyone is legally fraught
- uploading: data needs to get from the scanners into the data archive
- this is, from our source on the inside, the single most expensive and difficult part. Most hospitals are running a proprietary PACS system where they store their images; extracting the images from that to a regular computer is often extremely tedious, manual, and expensive.
- so, part of the project is to specify a format (as above) and aid each site in writing scripts to get data from their PACS system into that format and uploaded
- versioning: data should be versioned, so that work can be reproduced
- mirroring: data should be easily backed up from one site to another